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Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Whose Black History Will Be Taught?

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2023 //
22

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. reviews the long debate about how to teach Black history in an article in the New York Times. The debate began as rationales by sympathizers of the Confederacy, who changed the Civil War into “The War Between the States.” In a visit to Charleston, South Carolina, not long ago, I heard the war described in a historic home as “The War of Northern Aggression.”

Dr. Gates writes:

Lurking behind the concerns of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, over the content of a proposed high school course in African American studies, is a long and complex series of debates about the role of slavery and race in American classrooms.

“We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think, but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them,” Governor DeSantis said. He also decried what he called “indoctrination.”

School is one of the first places where society as a whole begins to shape our sense of what it means to be an American. It is in our schools that we learn how to become citizens, that we encounter the first civics lessons that either reinforce or counter the myths and fables we gleaned at home. Each day of first grade in my elementary school in Piedmont, W.Va., in 1956 began with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, followed by “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” To this day, I cannot prevent my right hand from darting to my heart the minute I hear the words of either.

It is through such rituals, repeated over and over, that certain “truths” become second nature, “self-evident” as it were. It is how the foundations of our understanding of the history of our great nation are constructed.

Even if we give the governor the benefit of the doubt about the motivations behind his recent statements about the content of the original version of the College Board’s A.P. curriculum in African American studies, his intervention falls squarely in line with a long tradition of bitter, politically suspect battles over the interpretation of three seminal periods in the history of American racial relations: the Civil War; the 12 years following the war, known as Reconstruction; and Reconstruction’s brutal rollback, characterized by its adherents as the former Confederacy’s “Redemption,” which saw the imposition of Jim Crow segregation, the reimposition of white supremacy and their justification through a masterfully executed propaganda effort.

Undertaken by apologists for the former Confederacy with an energy and alacrity that was astonishing in its vehemence and reach, in an era defined by print culture, politicians and amateur historians joined forces to police the historical profession. The so-called Lost Cause movement was, in effect, a take-no-prisoners social media war. And no single group or person was more pivotal to “the dissemination of the truths of Confederate history, earnestly and fully and officially,” than the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Mildred Lewis Rutherford, of Athens, Ga. Rutherford was a descendant of a long line of slave owners; her maternal grandfather owned slaves as early as 1820, and her maternal uncle, Howell Cobb, secretary of the Treasury under President James Buchanan, owned some 200 enslaved women and men in 1840. Rutherford served as the principal of the Lucy Cobb Institute (a school for girls in Athens) and vice president of the Stone Mountain Memorial project, the former Confederacy’s version of Mount Rushmore.

As the historian David Blight notes, “Rutherford gave new meaning to the term ‘die-hard.’” Indeed, she “considered the Confederacy ‘acquitted as blameless’ at the bar of history, and sought its vindication with a political fervor that would rival the ministry of propaganda in any twentieth-century dictatorship.” And she felt that the crimes of Reconstruction “made the Ku Klux Klan a necessity.” As I pointed out in a PBS documentary on the rise and fall of Reconstruction, Rutherford intuitively understood the direct connection between history lessons taught in the classroom and the Lost Cause racial order being imposed outside it, and she sought to cement that relationship with zeal and efficacy. She understood that what is inscribed on the blackboard translates directly to social practices unfolding on the street.

“Realizing that the textbooks in history and literature which the children of the South are now studying, and even the ones from which many of their parents studied before them,” she wrote in “A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books, and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries,” “are in many respects unjust to the South and her institutions, and that a far greater injustice and danger is threatening the South today from the late histories which are being published, guilty not only of misrepresentations but of gross omissions, refusing to give the South credit for what she has accomplished, … I have prepared, as it were, a testing or measuring rod.” And Rutherford used that measuring rod to wage a systematic campaign to redefine the Civil War not as our nation’s war to end the evils of slavery, but as “the War Between the States,” since as she wrote elsewhere, “the negroes of the South were never called slaves.” And they were “well-fed, well-clothed and well-housed.”

Of the more than 25 books and pamphlets that Rutherford published, none was more important than “A Measuring Rod.” Published in 1920, her user-friendly pamphlet was meant to be the index “by which every textbook on history and literature in Southern schools should be tested by those desiring the truth.” The pamphlet was designed to make it easy for “all authorities charged with the selection of textbooks for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions to measure all books offered for adoption by this ‘Measuring Rod,’ and adopt none which do not accord full justice to the South.” What’s more, her campaign was retroactive. As the historian Donald Yacovone tells us in his recent book, “Teaching White Supremacy,” Rutherford insisted that librarians “should scrawl ‘unjust to the South’ on the title pages” of any “unacceptable” books “already in their collections.”

On a page headed ominously by the word “Warning,” Rutherford provides a handy list of what a teacher or a librarian should “reject” or “not reject.”

“Reject a book that speaks of the Constitution other than a compact between Sovereign States.”

“Reject a textbook that does not give the principles for which the South fought in 1861, and does not clearly outline the interferences with the rights guaranteed to the South by the Constitution, and which caused secession.”

“Reject a book that calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, and the war a rebellion.”

“Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves.”

“Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves.”

And my absolute favorite, “Reject a textbook that glorified Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis, unless,” she adds graciously, “a truthful cause can be found for such glorification and vilification before 1865.”

And what of slavery? “This was an education that taught the negro self-control, obedience and perseverance — yes, taught him to realize his weaknesses and how to grow stronger for the battle of life,” Rutherford writes in 1923 in “The South Must Have Her Rightful Place.” “The institution of slavery as it was in the South, far from degrading the negro, was fast elevating him above his nature and race.” For Rutherford, who lectured wearing antebellum hoop gowns, the war over the interpretation of the meaning of the recent past was all about establishing the racial order of the present: “The truth must be told, and you must read it, and be ready to answer it.” Unless this is done, “in a few years there will be no South about which to write history.”

In other words, Rutherford’s common core was the Lost Cause. And it will come as no surprise that this vigorous propaganda effort was accompanied by the construction of many of the Confederate monuments that have dotted the Southern landscape since.

While it’s safe to assume that most contemporary historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction are of similar minds about Rutherford and the Lost Cause, it’s also true that one of the most fascinating aspects of African American studies is the rich history of debate over issues like this, and especially over what it has meant — and continues to mean — to be “Black” in a nation with such a long and troubled history of human slavery at the core of its economic system for two-and-a-half centuries.

Heated debates within the Black community, beginning as early as the first decades of the 19th century, have ranged from what names “the race” should publicly call itself (William Whipper vs. James McCune Smith) and whether or not enslaved men and women should rise in arms against their masters (Henry Highland Garnet vs. Frederick Douglass). Economic development vs. political rights? (Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. Du Bois). Should Black people return to Africa? (Marcus Garvey vs. W.E.B. Du Bois). Should we admit publicly the pivotal role of African elites in enslaving our ancestors? (Ali Mazrui vs. Wole Soyinka).

Add to these repeated arguments over sexism, socialism and capitalism, reparations, antisemitism and homophobia. It is often surprising to students to learn that there has never been one way to “be Black” among Black Americans, nor have Black politicians, activists and scholars ever spoken with one voice or embraced one ideological or theoretical framework. Black America, that “nation in a nation,” as the Black abolitionist Martin R. Delany put it, has always been as varied and diverse as the complexions of the people who have identified, or been identified, as its members.

I found these debates so fascinating, so fundamental to a fuller understanding of Black history, that I coedited a textbook that features them, and designed Harvard’s Introduction to African American Studies course, which I teach with the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, to acquaint students with a wide range of them in colorful and sometimes riotous detail. More recent debates over academic subjects like Kimberlé Crenshaw’s insightful theory of “intersectionality,” reparations, Black antisemitism, critical race theory and the 1619 Project — several of which made Mr. DeSantis’s hit list — will be included in the next edition of our textbook and will no doubt make it onto the syllabus of our introductory course.

As a consultant to the College Board as it developed its A.P. course in African American studies, I suggested the inclusion of a “pro and con” debate unit at the end of its curriculum because of the inherent scholarly importance of many of the contemporary hot-button issues that conservative politicians have been seeking to censor, but also as a way to help students understand the relation between the information they find in their textbooks and efforts by politicians to say what should and what should not be taught in the classroom.

Why shouldn’t students be introduced to these debates? Any good class in Black studies seeks to explore the widest range of thought voiced by Black and white thinkers on race and racism over the long course of our ancestors’ fight for their rights in this country. In fact, in my experience, teaching our field through these debates is a rich and nuanced pedagogical strategy, affording our students ways to create empathy across differences of opinion, to understand “diversity within difference,” and to reflect on complex topics from more than one angle. It forces them to critique stereotypes and canards about who “we are” as a people and what it means to be “authentically Black.” I am not sure which of these ideas has landed one of my own essays on the list of pieces the state of Florida found objectionable, but there it is.

The Harvard-trained historian Carter G. Woodson, who in 1926 invented what has become Black History Month, was keenly aware of the role of politics in the classroom, especially Lost Cause interventions. “Starting after the Civil War,” he wrote, “the opponents of freedom and social Justice decided to work out a program which would enslave the Negroes’ mind inasmuch as the freedom of the body has to be conceded.”

“It was well understood,” Woodson continued, “that if by the teaching of history the white man could be further assured of his superiority and the Negro could be made to feel that he had always been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race is necessary the freedman, then, would still be a slave.”

“If you can control a man’s thinking,” Woodson concluded, “you do not have to worry about his action.”

Is it fair to see Governor DeSantis’s attempts to police the contents of the College Board’s A.P. curriculum in African American studies in classrooms in Florida solely as little more than a contemporary version of Mildred Rutherford’s Lost Cause textbook campaign? No. But the governor would do well to consider the company that he is keeping. And let’s just say that he, no expert in African American history, seems to be gleefully embarked on an effort to censor scholarship about the complexities of the Black past with a determination reminiscent of Rutherford’s. While most certainly not embracing her cause, Mr. DeSantis is complicitous in perpetuating her agenda.

As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so aptly put it, “No society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present.” Addressing these “ravages,” and finding solutions to them — a process that can and should begin in the classroom — can only proceed with open discussions and debate across the ideological spectrum, a process in which Black thinkers themselves have been engaged since the earliest years of our Republic.

Throughout Black history, there has been a long, sad and often nasty tradition of attempts to censor popular art forms, from the characterization of the blues, ragtime and jazz as “the devil’s music” by guardians of “the politics of respectability,” to efforts to censor hip-hop by C. Delores Tucker, who led a campaign to ban gangsta rap music in the 1990s. Hip-hop has been an equal opportunity offender for potential censors: Mark Wichner, the deputy sheriff of Florida’s Broward County, brought 2 Live Crew up on obscenity charges in 1990. But there is a crucial difference between Ms. Tucker, best known as a civil rights activist, and Mr. Wichner, an administrator of justice on behalf of the state, a difference similar to that between Rutherford and Mr. DeSantis.

While the urge to censor art — a symbolic form of vigilante policing — is colorblind, there is no equivalence between governmental censorship and the would-be censorship of moral crusaders. Many states are following Florida’s lead in seeking to bar discussions of race and history in classrooms. The distinction between Mildred Lewis Rutherford and Governor DeSantis? The power differential.

Rutherford wished for nothing less than the power to summon the apparatus of the state to impose her strictures on our country’s narrative about the history of race and racism. Mr. DeSantis has that power and has shown his willingness to use it. And it is against this misguided display of power that those of us who cherish the freedom of inquiry at the heart of our country’s educational ideal must take a stand.

Dr. Gates is the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. He is the host of the PBS television series “Finding Your Roots.”

Categories Education Reform, History, Race, Racism

Paul Bonner: The Missing Strategy for School Improvement

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2023 //
87

Paul Bonner is a retired teacher and principal. He consistently posts wise insights about teaching and schools.

We spend a significant amount of time bemoaning the existence of charters, vouchers, and privatization, and deservedly so. However, what we don’t challenge is the the misguided culture that drives much of the leadership within public school bureaucracy. I have read untold articles, attended conferences, and sat through meetings with my superiors where the validity of school boards is questioned. I have watched politically tone deaf school board members, politicians, and citizens question the role of superintendents. I have heard little from elected or appointed leadership that shows real concern for the needs of individual schools. The circular firing squad comes to mind. Superintendents across the country along with School Boards should take some blame for the rise of privatized initiatives. Citizens get frustrated because the district apparatus too often comes off as aloof and disengaged from the issues facing communities. The disjointed efforts of school policy makers has given an opening to corporate interests who see the chance to make a buck through lobbying district leaders and various politicians because, too often, school districts seem incapable of carrying out their mission to serve children. Where are parents to turn? Finland famously turned their schools around by focusing on preparing and providing for teachers. We in the US continue to organize through top down bureaucratic models that contribute to the profound inequality of student opportunity while perpetually searching for the Superintendent who can fix it. The wasted resources spent on the ongoing dance in large city districts with failed superintendents, as evidenced by an average service time of 3.76 years (k12insight.com), will only continue if policy makers focus on “the one best system” over investment in the foundation of teacher driven instruction. Data clearly reveals that superintendents have almost no impact on individual student achievement, whereas teachers given the tools to establish relationships with students and their parents have a life long impact.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Education Reform, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching

Michigan: For-Profit Charter Schools Are a Disaster

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2023 //
3

Cassandra Ulbrich is the former president of the Michigan State Board of Education. She is also a member of the board of the Network for Public Education. In this post, which appeared in Bridge Michigan, she describes the failure of for-profit charters, whose top goal is making money, not educating students.

She writes:

When it comes to education, Michigan’s number one. Unfortunately, that’s not a good thing.

Once again, Michigan has the dubious distinction of being the state with the highest percentage of charter schools run by for-profit corporations in the nation. Eighty-one percent of Michigan’s nearly 300 charter schools contract with private management companies, often referred to as Charter Management Organizations (CMO).

headshot

Casandra Ulbrich is the former president of the State Board of Education.

What do we get in exchange? Mediocre results and a lack of financial transparency.

As the former president of the Michigan State Board of Education, I was often told by charter choice advocates that charters report the same information as every other traditional public school. As an educational administrator and researcher, I knew from experience this was false. And in my last year in office, I led a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exercise that proved it.

As the recently released report, Chartered for Profit II: Pandemic Profiteering, published by the Network for Public Education (NPE) — of which I am a board member — explains, the charter industry downplays the prevalence of charter schools being run for profit. The report explains how by using webs of related corporations, for-profit charters take ownership of school buildings and real estate, sometimes charging their own schools excessive leasing rates. Then, when the building is paid off, the property is flipped — at times to another entity they created, forcing taxpayers to re-pay off real estate that the public does not own.

Has any of this resulted in increased student achievement? The answer is a resounding no. Nationally, charters run as for-profit graduate students at lower rates and with more adverse academic outcomes as the number of charter services managed by for-profit operators increases. That comes from a report published by the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Here in Michigan, student achievement relative to national averages has declined since charters were introduced.

The vast wealth created by the industry has allowed it to influence policymakers and keep regulations lax. But taxpayers are calling for better laws that create a level field for all. That is why the recent Biden Administration regulations put the brakes on giving for-profit-run schools Charter School Programs funding. It’s time for Michigan to do the same.

The NPE report outlines six simple policy changes that could be made to close many legal loopholes and ensure public funds end up serving students, not profiteers. In addition, at the end of 2022, the State Board of Education issued a common-sense resolution calling for increased charter school transparency in our state. The resolution calls on the Legislature to strengthen charter school laws, including:

  • Requiring CMO contracts to include annual audited financial statement provisions
  • Requiring CMOs to produce annual audited financial statements for authorizers to account for any fees collected to oversee charters
  • Requiring all schools to post annual student recruitment costs
  • Subject CMOs to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)

It’s time to ensure our most dedicated charter schools prosper and bad actors are weeded out.

Categories Education Reform

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2023 //
10

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Categories Education Reform

Massachusetts: Block the Worcester Charter School

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2023 //
4

Parents and educators in Worcester, Massachusetts, are outraged that the State Cimmissioner of Education Jeff Riley has recommended state approval of thexWorcester Cultural Academy. Its sponsors have openly admitted that revenues from the school will be used to subsidize another cultural institution, Old Sturbridge Village. This is downright bizarre. If the state wants to subsidize Old Sturbridge Village, it should do so directly, without diverting pupils and money from the Worcester public schools.

Citizens for Public Schools released this statement:

Citizens for Public Schools calls on state officials to reject the proposal from Worcester Cultural Academy to create a new charter school in Worcester.

We ask Commissioner Jeff Riley to withdraw his favorable recommendation, Gov. Maura Healey and Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler to oppose the proposal, and the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to reject it if Commissioner Riley does not withdraw it.

CPS was among the vast majority of individuals and groups who submitted public comment against the proposal, comments that were ignored in Commissioner Riley’s favorable recommendation.

Worcester educators have provided detailed criticism of the curriculum and other aspects of the proposal, and pointed out the harm it would do to children in Worcester Public Schools that will lose many millions of dollars to the new charter if it is approved.

But the application also raises an issue that has nothing to do with the benefits or harm of charter schools. The sponsors openly say they plan to use public education funds to “safeguard” the finances of a private organization, Old Sturbridge Village.

“Our [charter] academies will provide reliable, contractual revenue to the museum, safeguarding us against fluctuations in uncontrollable factors that impact admission revenue,” says the Old Sturbridge Village 2022 annual report.

And about that contract: By the fifth year, the proposal is to turn over nearly half a million dollars a year to Old Sturbridge Village for financial services to one small school.

The Worcester School Committee is meeting today to ask the state Inspector General and Auditor to look into that arrangement.

Voting against the Sturbridge charter proposal tomorrow would make a strong statement that the state board, established to support public education, is working to protect and not harm our state’s children.

Vote no.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Massachusetts

David Berliner, Et Al: How Public Schools Can Save Millions of Dollars

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2023 //
112

David Berliner and two colleagues wrote an article proposing a simple and research-based way that public schools can save millions of dollars annually: Stop testing every student every year. Test every third year or every other year. They explain why this makes sense in an article posted on Valerie Strauss’s blog The Answer Sheet.

Strauss begins:

States spend millions of dollars every year to purchase standardized tests in an exercise that has come under strong criticism in recent years for reasons including the quality of the exams and the often invalid ways that districts and states use the scores.


While the billion-dollar testing industry is undergoing changes, with a bigger share of its spending going to the purchase of digital exams, the same questions remain, including: Are states wasting money?

The federal government requires annual statewide tests in reading/language arts and mathematics for all students in grades three through eight and once in high school, and some states tack on other standardized exams. A decade ago, one analysis found that states spent a combined $1.7 billion on these exams, and experts say the total has only gone up.


This post argues that the states are wasting money, and it explains an alternative to save money and increase instructional time. It was written by David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs and Margarita Pivovarova.


Berliner, Regents’ professor emeritus at the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, is a past president of the American Educational Research Association who has published extensively about educational psychology, teacher education and educational policy. Gibbs is a program evaluator for the Mesa Unified School District in Arizona whose research focuses on assessment and accountability, comparative and international education, and inclusive and participatory decision-making. Pivovarova is an associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University whose research focuses on the relationship between student achievement, teacher quality and school contextual factors.


This post argues that the states are wasting money, and it explains an alternative to save money and increase instructional time. It was written by David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs and Margarita Pivovarova.


Berliner, Regents’ professor emeritus at the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, is a past president of the American Educational Research Association who has published extensively about educational psychology, teacher education and educational policy. Gibbs is a program evaluator for the Mesa Unified School District in Arizona whose research focuses on assessment and accountability, comparative and international education, and inclusive and participatory decision-making. Pivovarova is an associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University whose research focuses on the relationship between student achievement, teacher quality and school contextual factors.


By David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs, and Margarita Pivovarova


Could state educational policymakers do with a few million extra dollars? Surely, America’s teachers can help us all think of something to do with that money. We know how they can do it.

We explain below how this is done, as we did more extensively in a just-published article in Education Policy Analysis Archives, a respected, peer-reviewed educational research journal.


We presented data suggesting a remarkably easy and substantially cheaper way for each state to get the information it desires about the academic performance of its schools from the standardized tests it uses. In addition, following the advice offered in this article, there would also be an increase in instructional time for students. Let us set the stage for this research first.


Suppose a set of nonidentical triplets are identified at age 5. One is tall for his age, one is of medium height, and one is short for his age. At age 6, what is the chance that these children have changed the order of their heights? Sure, they will probably be a little taller, but the order is highly likely to be the same, almost every year. Certainly, if one of the triplets takes special hormones, or one contracts a lengthy disease, the order might change. But without an unusual event, these triplets are quite likely to grow into adulthood as they were — one relatively short, one medium, and one tall. Their rank order, not their height itself, will almost assuredly remain the same.


If we used statistics and did year-to-year rank order correlations for the triplets’ height, the result would likely be a correlation of 1.00, indicating a perfect correlation. This would inform us that the rank order of the triplets is always the same, even if their heights do actually change a bit until they are well past puberty. But even then, regardless of their actual height, their relative height is likely to be constant, and thus it probably need not be measured frequently at all. We “know” that year after year, when we measure their heights, the triplets are almost assuredly still going to be tall, medium, and short in comparison to each other, Eventually, it simply wouldn’t be worth the effort to measure their heights frequently.


Well, it turns out that the hundreds of schools in a state line up in scores just as do as the triplets. Their relative test scores — whether low, medium or high — barely change at all, year after year, regardless of the scoring system used by the standardized testing company. If the relative scores don’t change much year after year, except under some unusual circumstances, why would you need to test the students in those schools to learn how they are doing, year after year?

Here, for example, are the correlations between test scores in mathematics, from one year to the next, for every elementary school in Nebraska, for the years 2014 to 2018. Those year-to-year correlations are .93, .95, .94, .90, .95. These data inform us that if you know this year’s scores in mathematics for each Nebraska school, you know almost perfectly how those schools will test the following year. It’s the equivalent of knowing the order of the heights of the triplets this year, and thus being quite sure you would know the order of their heights were you to measure them the next year. Similarly, if you already know the standardized test scores for every elementary school in Nebraska, you don’t really need to test the next year. Next year’s ordering of Nebraska’s schools will look very much like this years’ ordering of its schools. So why not skip a year or two of testing, and save millions of dollars and millions of instructional hours?


With correlations in the .90’s between last year’s test scores and this year’s test scores, as was empirically obtained, you certainly don’t need to test every year to know how the schools in Nebraska are performing. If big changes in a school’s performance did occur, you’d certainly pick that up through testing every other year. Apparently, unless a schools catchment area changes, or is rezoned so it has a big shift in population, or it must deal with a natural (earthquake) or man-made disaster (a school shooting) that upends the school community, a school’s standing in a pool of standardized test scores will not change much from year to year.


We repeated our analyses in another state, at other grade levels, and for other subject matters. For example, here are the correlations for one year’s standardized achievement test scores in reading, with the following years’ achievement test scores in reading, for all of Texas’s middle schools, over five years: .92, .91, .91, .93, .93. As in Nebraska, knowing this year’s standardized test score informs us almost perfectly what next year’s test score will be. We know how each school will perform because of its previous score. The rank order of a school, vis-a-vis every other school in the state, is quite stable. Mandated achievement tests in Nebraska and Texas need not be given every year to answer the question: How is this school doing? Testing every other year in Nebraska and Texas, and we suspect in all other states, would yield the same information desired by those concerned about how the schools are doing academically.


But it gets better, and thus even more millions of dollars might be saved! Presented next are the correlations between tests of reading given two years apart on Texas’s middle school reading test (.89, .89, .89, 90). And here are the correlations between tests of reading given two years apart for Nebraska middle schools (.92, .95, .91, .97). In other words, almost the same rank order of schools will be present in Nebraska and in Texas if you tested every third year, saving the states a gazillion dollars in money and time, and it would also reduce the annual surge in the test anxiety of thousands of U.S. students, teachers, and parents.

Testing every third, or every second year, results in virtually no loss of information for district, state or federal agencies. We are not recommending doing away with the assessment of student achievement by means of standardized achievement tests, but we are pointing out that we seem to have overdone it. Testing annually eats up a great deal of instructional time and a large amount of money but yields little new information for states, districts and schools.

To those who say that “the teachers need the standardized test results to know how their students are doing,” we have two answers. First, experienced teachers already know how their students are doing in relation to their states’ recommended curriculum, and they don’t need a standardized test to provide them with that information. Research evidence informs us that experienced teachers are quite good at predicting the rank order of each of their students on their own states’ standardized achievement tests.
The other answer to this tired rationale for standardized testing is related to scheduling. The tests are typically given in spring. Test results are, therefore, usually analyzed over the summer months. Test results, by necessity, are given back in the fall of the calendar year, to teachers who have already passed their students on to teachers in the next grade! The information about student achievement, when teachers no longer have those students, comes too late to make any midcourse corrections in their instruction.


And some have argued that achievement testing has value for school administrators, who might then be able to identify exemplary and ineffective teachers from the test performance of the students those teachers had the previous year. But that is no easy identification to make, since each year’s classroom level achievement test data is greatly affected by the kinds of students a teacher was assigned. Substantial differences in achievement test scores occur for teachers depending on the numbers of second-language learners, or students with high absentee rates or special-education students who were assigned to their classrooms. In fact, even classes with slightly more girls than boys generally score higher on tests than classes with more boys than girls. So, inferring teacher competence from standardized test results is quite problematic.


Now that this research article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, we wonder which state will be first to petition the federal government for a waiving of the current testing requirements? Will the federal government grant such waivers, or are its policies immutable? We are pretty sure that a state choosing to test every third year, or every other year, will save millions of dollars and millions of instructional hours, with no loss of the information it believes to be useful. A reconsideration of our nation’s assessment policies is surely warranted.

Categories Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

Wisconsin: The Most Important Election of 2023

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2023 //
6

Here is the most important election of 2023: Control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The election is April 4, 2023.

The current Court is 4-3, with a Republican majority. A win by Democrats will reverse the balance and be crucial on issues of abortion, gerrymandering, and schools. It is also a chance to reverse the damage done by Republican Scott Walker.

Charlie Sykes writes in The Bulwark, a site established by Never-Trumpers:

The election that the media has dubbed “the most important election nobody’s ever heard of,” is just weeks away, and has already drawn international attention.

The “Stakes are monstrous,” declared Britain’s Guardian. “Wisconsin judicial race is 2023’s key election.”

Voting is under way in an under-the-radar race that could wind up being the most important election in America this year.

The NYT headlined: “2023’s Biggest, Most Unusual Race Centers on Abortion and Democracy.” Within weeks, the Times reported, “Wisconsin will hold an election that carries bigger policy stakes than any other contest in America in 2023.”

The state’s high court now has a 4-3 conservative majority, but one of the conservative members is retiring, which has created an opening for progressives to flip the high court for the first time in decades.

And everything is on the line: from Act 10, which limited public employee collective bargaining rights, to gerrymandering, abortion, and the way presidential elections are decided.

“If you change control of the Supreme Court from relatively conservative to fairly liberal, that will be a big, big change and that would last for quite a while,” said David T. Prosser Jr., a conservative former justice who retired from the court in 2016.

The contest will almost certainly shatter spending records for a judicial election in any state, and could even double the current most expensive race. Wisconsinites are set to be inundated by a barrage of advertising, turning a typically sleepy spring election into the latest marker in the state’s nonstop political season.

The Wapo reports that the election “will have sweeping consequences, as the court in the coming years is likely to decide whether to uphold the state’s near-total ban on abortion. It also could wade into disputes over gerrymandering and the outcome of the next presidential election.”

The Bulwark’s headline also captured the stakes “Wisconsin Supreme Court Race a Test for Democracy.”

On paper, the contest is non-partisan, but nobody even bothers to pretend anymore. Next Tuesday’s free-for-all primary includes four candidates: two progressives: Janet Protasiewicz and Everett Mitchell; and two conservatives: Dan Kelly and Jennifer Dorow.

The conventional wisdom (which is likely correct) is that the primary will set up a contest between left and right. The same conventional wisdom (on both sides of aisle) thinks that Protasiewicz is the strongest progressive candidate, while Dorow — who achieved a sort of media stardom for presiding over a high-profile criminal case — is the most electable conservative. Kelly, who was named to the Court by former Governor Scott Walker at the urging of the Federalist Society, has already lost a statewide election — a rare defeat for an incumbent justice.

**

But now we get to the strangest twist in this high-stakes story: After decades of ignoring or downplaying crucial judicial elections like this one, Democrats and their allies are very much focused on the Wisconsin contest.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin conservatives have chosen this moment to crack up.

While progressive dollars pour into the state, Republicans have launched a bitter, high-stakes, and often quite personal, civil war that seems designed to take out the candidate who may give them the best chance to hold onto control of the state’s high court…

To finish the article, subscribe to The Bulwark.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Republicans, Unions, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Schneider & Berkshire: A Reverse Robin Hood Plan: Stealing from the Poor to Pay the Tuition of the Rich

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2023 //
11

Historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire call out the hidden secret of vouchers: they steal from the public schools of the poor to fund the private and religious schools of the affluent. In state after state, 75-80% of the kids who use voucher money are already enrolled in nonpublic schools.

In an article in The Nation, Schneider and Berkshire write:

The assault on public education currently unfolding in state legislatures across the United States stands to annually transfer tens of billions of dollars from public treasuries to the bank accounts of upper-income families. Those dollars, which otherwise would have gone to public schools, will instead reimburse parents currently paying private school tuition. It’s a reverse Robin Hood scheme that Americans would hate if they fully understood what was going on.

That’s not the sales pitch, of course. As Betsy DeVos and her allies like to put it, their cause is “education freedom.” They want American families to have “options” beyond their local public schools. And their plan for creating those options is to push various forms of school vouchers. The money that otherwise would have gone to local schools, instead, would be given to families. Families could then take those dollars—sometimes loaded on an actual debit card—and spend them at whatever kind of school, or on whatever kind of educational product, they want.

There are many reasons to dislike this plan. Public schools are open to all, meaning that they can’t turn students away on the basis of characteristics like ability or identity. And public schools serve the public good. That’s why we fund them with our tax dollars—because we expect them to serve all of us.

Private schools, by contrast, can turn students away for nearly any reason, including that they have disabilities that make them more expensive to educate. As more states adopt programs that use taxpayer dollars to fund private schools, taxpayers are increasingly footing the bill for discrimination.

In Florida, for instance, a religious school that notified families this fall that LGBTQ students were no longer welcome and would be asked to leave immediately still receives more than $1.6 million a year in public funds through the state’s private school voucher program.

But school voucher plans are a raw deal not just for public schools and the students who attend them but also for taxpayers. Programs like the one jammed through by the Republican legislature in Iowa this week stand to immediately transfer massive amounts of cash directly from state treasuries to the families that least need it.

While proponents, like Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, sold the plan as a way to give choices to poor and middle-class families, the program will chiefly subsidize the parents who already send their kids to private schools. The cost of that subsidy is significant—an estimated $340 million each year once the plan is fully phased in—and will be borne by the 500,000 students who attend the state’s underfunded public schools.

And it’s not just in Iowa that Republicans are pulling off this reverse Robin Hood maneuver. In Arizona, where lawmakers recently made all students eligible for school vouchers, 75 percent of the students who applied for the new subsidy never attended public school. The same dynamic is playing out in New Hampshire, where GOP legislators enacted an “education freedom” program over stiff public opposition. At Laconia Christian Academy, for instance, all but two families in the school took advantage of the program, pulling roughly half a million dollars out of the public treasury.

Please open the link and finish reading the entire article. It nails the essential outcome of vouchers, which may also be their purpose. They subsidize the students who never attended public schools at the expense of the public schools of the poor.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Shame, Vouchers

Florida: Will DeSantis Be Able to Hide the History of Atrocities Against Black People in His State?

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2023 //
17

As Governor Ron DeSantis stirs up passions over hot-button issues and declares his state the place “where WOKE goes to die,” African Americans in his state are determined not to let him bury their history.

Why is he so eager to suppress the teaching of Black history? His campaign against “woke” and against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not a thinly veiled attempt to hide the past. It is an egregious and blatant attempt to hide the past.

Unfortunately, his efforts to crush efforts to eliminate racism have been copied across the nation by other red states, which have passed laws banning the teaching of critical race theory, The 1619 Project, “divisive concepts,” and anything that would make some students feel “uncomfortable.” The language of the last phrase implies that teaching about atrocities by whites against blacks might make white students feel “uncomfortable,” so skip those events. Ignore them. Don’t teach them. Bury the past.

Dr. Marvin Dunn is the leading scholar of Black history in Florida. He is an emeritus professor at Florida International University. I just read his book A History of Florida Through Black Eyes, and I urge you to do the same.

For starters, I learned that the first Black people to arrive in what was later the continental United States arrived with Spanish explorer Ponce deLeon in 1513–not in Virginia as slaves in 1619. Every subsequent Spanish explorer brought Black men with them, sometimes as slaves, sometimes as free men with needed skills. Because Florida was controlled by Spain until 1821, it became a haven for escaped slaves from other states. White troops frequently came into Florida in search of the escapees. Free blacks joined with the Seminoles to resist the invaders. When the Seminoles were deported west, some of their Black allies left with them.

Florida did not acquire statehood until 1845.

Black people in Florida, whose population was about the same as whites after Florida became a state, were subject to harsh discrimination as in other southern states. They were treated as chattel and “owned in the same manner as one owned horses or cows.” Manumission was expensive and rare.

During the Civil War, large numbers of Blacks, slave and free, joined the Union Army and fought for their freedom. After the War, Black men entered political life, but their success outraged whites, who murdered Blacks and engaged in violence to prevent Blacks from voting and assuming full citizenship. Voting was dangerous for Blacks. After Reconstruction, whites regained political power and re-established their dominance over Blacks. Northern whites ignored the betrayal of Blacks across the South, who returned to a state of subservience barely different from slavery.

The southern press, Dunn writes, regularly wrote of Blacks as “lusting beasts” who were a threat to the social order, “particularly to the safety of white women.” Many of the most notorious lynchings (which whites called “a necktie party”) were instigated by a claim or rumor that a Black man had raped or violated a white woman by a remark, a letter, or any sort of familiarity.

The history of lynching casts a dark shadow over the state’s history, and it is so brutal, so vile, so shameful that white state officials never wanted it to be told in school textbooks.

An underlying, persistent theme in lynchings of Blacks was sexual. Whites not only murdered Black men, they mutilated their penises and other parts of their bodies. On the occasions when mobs lynched whites for murder or rape or cattle rustling, they were not sexually mutilated.

The most celebrated atrocity in Florida occurred in a small black community named Rosewood. A white woman alleged that she had been assaulted and robbed by a black man. Word spread fast, and a mob of white men began scouring Rosewood for the alleged assailant. A black woman who worked for the white “victim” said that she had gotten into a fight with her white lover while her husband was at work at the lumber mill, but only other Blacks believed her.

The mob was intent on finding a Black man and punish him. As suspicion went from one Black man to another, the mob besieged the home of a Black family, and shots were exchanged. Both Blacks and whites were killed. The mob responded by burning every home in Rosewood to the ground, extinguishing the community.

Some survivors escaped by fleeing through the swamp. In the 1990s, the few remaining survivors sued the state for failing to protect their homes and won reparations. Dr. Dunn bought five acres in what was once Rosewood; he unearths and preserves relics of what was once a thriving community.

Dunn describes many lynchings, each horrible, but the one that stands out is the lynching of Claude Neal in 1934 in Marianna, Florida.

The story begins when the body of a young white woman was discovered under a log. She had been raped and beaten to death with a hammer. A young farmhand, Claude Neal, was accused and signed a confession; Dunn thinks he may have been coerced. Without a trial, there’s no way of knowing. The police took him into custody and moved him from jail to jail to keep him away from the mob.

Neal ended up in a jail in Brewton, Alabama, 130 miles from the scene of the crime. But a mob found him and brought him back to Jackson County, Florida.

The mob was led by a “Committee of Six” that announced its intention to lynch Neal. An AP reporter was on hand, and the news of the lynching was broadcast through radio and newspapers.

Given the advance notice, some groups issued appeals to Governor David Scholtz and federal agencies to step in and stop the lynching. The governor couldn’t be reached, and the federal agencies denied they had jurisdiction even though he had been kidnapped and taken across state lines.

When the time came for the well-advertised lynching, some 4,000 whites had gathered for the spectacle.

The leaders of the mob were concerned by the large, unruly crowd, so they postponed the lynching. Instead, they took Neal to the Chipola River to kill him. Before he was killed, they cut off his penis and made him eat it. Then they cut off his testicles, made him eat them and say that he liked doing so. Then they tortured him with knives, slicing his stomach and arms, cutting off fingers, then applying red hot irons to burn him. As the torture proceeded, they strung him up, then let him down, and continued the torture.

After he was dead, the whites tied his mangled body to the front bumper of a car, as a deer would be tied, and brought it to the scene of the crime. They dumped his body on the ground, and women and children savaged it some more with sharpened sticks.

Eventually the mangled body was strung up on a tree in front of the Jackson County Courthouse. Pictures were taken of it, made into postcards, and sold as souvenirs. Bystanders continued to mutilate the corpse. The sheriff cut it down the next day. That made the mob angry, and the governor sent in the National Guard to restore order.

As Dunn notes in various places in the book, on the occasions when whites were arrested and tried for crimes against blacks, the charges were always dismissed by an all-white jury. Little wonder that mobs could commit vicious crimes without fear of prosecution.

Dunn points out that he usually found evidence of whites who opposed the mob violence, sometimes at risk to themselves. During the Rosewood frenzy, the white owner of the general store told his white clerk to hide the ammunition and tell anyone who asked that they were sold out.

This brutality is hard to read. It is hard to comprehend. It is obscene. Would it make students uncomfortable? Yes, it would and it should.

DeSantis doesn’t want this history to be taught because he doesn’t want to upset students. But it is factual history. Should it be suppressed? It’s not appropriate to expose very young children to these historical events. They might have nightmares. But high school students should learn this history because they are mature enough to think about it and consider its root cause: racism.

Is it “woke” to learn the truth? I don’t think so.

The only people who would react to this history with a sense of guilt and shame are those who identify with the oppressors.

Most people, I think, would identify with those who were brutalized, commiserating with them as fellow human beings subjected to inhumane treatment.

The whites who want to hide, purge, and suppress this history identify with the oppressors.

What do you think?

Categories Education Reform

Texas: How Charter Leaders Profit by Buying Property, Paying Rent to Themselves

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2023 //
3

The Houston Chronicle is shining a bright light on some of the shadiest real estate deals that enrich charter school operators. What could be better than to get a charter, buy property, rent it to the charter at rates of their choosing, get the property made tax-exempt, and make a bundle using taxpayer dollars? In some charter schools, the superintendent owns the properties and pays himself rent.

Just over two years ago, Universal Academy, a Texas charter school with two campuses in the Dallas area, made a surprising move.

In November 2020, a nonprofit foundation formed to support the school bought a luxury horse ranch and equestrian center from former ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson. The 12-building complex features a show barn “designed with Normandy-style cathedral ceilings,” a 120,000 square foot climate-controlled riding arena and a viewing pavilion with kitchen and bathrooms.

The Cosmopolitan condominium building at 1600 Post Oak Blvd where Accelerated Learning Academy purchased a 1,119-square-foot condo unit, claiming they needed the space for storage, photographed Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in Houston.
The Cosmopolitan condominium building at 1600 Post Oak Blvd where Accelerated Learning Academy purchased a 1,119-square-foot condo unit, claiming they needed the space for storage, photographed Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in Houston.Jon Shapley/Staff photographer

Just over two years ago, Universal Academy, a Texas charter school with two campuses in the Dallas area, made a surprising move.

In November 2020, a nonprofit foundation formed to support the school bought a luxury horse ranch and equestrian center from former ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson. The 12-building complex features a show barn “designed with Normandy-style cathedral ceilings,” a 120,000 square foot climate-controlled riding arena and a viewing pavilion with kitchen and bathrooms.

RELATED: IDEA Public Schools signed $15M lease for luxury jet despite being under state investigation

Last summer the Texas Education Agency granted Universal Academy permission to create a new elementary campus on the horse property’s manicured grounds. It will offer students riding lessons, according to a brochure, for $9,500.

Sales prices aren’t public in Texas, but the 100-acre property had been listed for $12 million when Tillerson, who also served as secretary of state under former President Donald Trump, bought it in 2009. Because of the foundation’s nonprofit status and its plans to offer equine therapy, the parcel has been removed from the tax rolls.

School board President Janice Blackmon said Universal hopes to use the facility to start a 4H chapter and Western-style horsemanship training, among other programs that take advantage of its rural location. “We’re trying to broaden the students and connect them to their Texas roots,” she said.

Splashy purchases like the horse arena are receiving increasing public scrutiny as charter schools continue to expand aggressively across Texas. Under state law, charter schools are public schools — just owned and managed privately, unlike traditional school districts.

An analysis by Hearst Newspapers found cases in which charter schools collected valuable real estate at great cost to taxpayers but with a tenuous connection to student learning. In others, administrators own the school facilities and have collected millions from charging rent to the same schools they run.

In Houston, the superintendent and founder of Diversity, Roots and Wings Academy, or DRAW, owns or controls four facilities used by the school, allowing him to bill millions to schools he oversees. DRAW’s most recent financial report shows signed lease agreements to pay Fernando Donatti, the superintendent, and his companies more than $6.5 million through 2031.

In an email, superintendent Donetti at DRAW said the property transactions were ethical, in the best interest of DRAW’s students and properly reported to state regulators. He said his school was “lucky” he was able to purchase the property because of challenges charters can face finding proper facilities.

Also in the Houston area, at ComQuest Academy Charter High School, the superintendent and her husband also own the company to which the school pays rent.

And Accelerated Learning Academy, a charter school based in Houston, is still trying to get a tax exemption on one of the two condominiums it bought just over a decade ago in upscale neighborhoods in Houston and Dallas. The school claims it has used the condos for storage, despite a nearby 9,600 square foot facility.

The battles between school districts and charter networks have become increasingly pitched, as they are locked in a zero-sum battle for public dollars.

Last year in Houston, about 45,000 students transferred from the ISD to charter schools, resulting in a loss to the district of a minimum of $276 million. That figure includes only the basic allotment received by the districts, excluding special education funding or other allotments.

In San Antonio, the two largest school districts are Northside ISD and North East ISD. More than 12,000 Northside students transferred to charter schools in the 2021-2022 school year, as did just under 8,000 from North East ISD. That means Northside lost at least $75 million, while North East lost $50 million, using the same basic allotment figures.

Each side cries foul about the other’s perceived advantages: charters are able to operate with less government and public scrutiny, while school districts benefit from zoning boards and can lean on a local tax base for financing.

Georgina Perez, who served on the State Board of Education from 2017 until this year, noted arrangements such as these would never be permitted at traditional school districts.

“If it can’t be done in (school districts), they probably had a good reason to disallow it,” she said. “So why can it be done with privately managed charter franchises?”

Lawmaker: ‘Sunshine’ is best cure

The largest charter network in Texas was a catalyst for the increased public scrutiny of charter school spending.

IDEA Public Schools faces state investigation for its spending habits, including purchases of luxury boxes at San Antonio Spurs games, lavish travel expenditures for executives, the acquisition of a boutique hotel in Cameron County for more than $1 million, plans to buy a $15 million private jet and other allegations of irresponsible or improper use of funds. The allegations date back to 2015 and led to the departure of top executives — including CEO and founder Tom Torkelson, who received a $900,000 severance payment.

Over the years lawmakers have steadily tightened rules for charter governance. A 2013 bill included provisions to strengthen nepotism rules; a 2021 law outlawed large severance payments. That bill was sponsored by Rep. Terry Canales, a South Texas Democrat whose district has some of the highest rates of charter school enrollment in the state.

“There’s a lot of work to be done for the people of Texas when it comes to charter schools,” Canales said. “Sunshine is the best cure for corruption. And the reality is it seems to be sanctioned corruption in charter schools.”

Considering the increased scrutiny, “It’s a myth that charter schools today are unregulated,” said Joe Hoffer, a San Antonio attorney who works on behalf of many charter schools. “Every session, more and more laws get passed.” If anything, he said, charter schools often have to jump through more regulatory hoops than local schools.

Yet acquiring property remains a gray area.

Charter schools that can’t purchase their own property typically must lease it and pay taxes. A 2021 state law authored by Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, a San Antonio Democrat who operates a charter, made such arrangements tax-free. But the Texas Supreme Court later blocked parts of the law, and it has been applied differently by counties across the state.

It’s unusual for school districts to lease their facilities; typically they are publicly owned or constructed. Local school districts are governed by nonpartisan elected boards, and when the board decides to purchase real estate, it must notify the public of the contract and voters can petition the district to block it. If a project requires bonding or new taxes, it must be put on the ballot.

At charters, by comparison, the governing board is appointed, not elected, so it does not answer to local voters. The main public scrutiny comes later, when the information about the sale must be disclosed in annual required filings with the Texas Education Agency.

The state education agency has the authority to review charter real estate transactions and sometimes does. In Dallas, Golden Rule Charter School is under state investigation for a real estate deal and possible nepotism. The school declined to release details because the investigation is pending.

But such reviews are often cursory, if they happen at all.

When charters report a real estate transaction to the education agency, Hoffer said, they typically just receive a letter back saying it has been recorded, with a clause reminding the schools that state regulators have the authority to return for an audit or demand the deal be re-done.

Critics say it isn’t enough. “The problem that a lot of us have had with charters is that they are considered public schools and they are taxpayer-funded, but they don’t have taxpayer scrutiny,” said state Rep. Donna Howard, an Austin Democrat and former trustee at Eanes ISD. “It’s a real lack of accountability.”

Some deals benefit administrators

According to its website, Horizon Montessori Public School operates four campuses in the Rio Grande Valley, one on Sugar Cane Drive in Weslaco. Until recently, records show, the property and its two commercial buildings were owned by Superintendent Alim Ansari.

Hidalgo County appraisal records showAnsari also apparently lived in a 4,800-square-foot home at the back of the 2.85-acre parcel, a portion of which was granted a homestead limitation on its taxes.

In addition to serving as Ansari’s home, records from the Texas Education Agency show that between 2015 and 2020, the superintendent leased his Weslaco property to Horizon for classroom and office space, collecting $118,000 a year in rent during the period. In 2020, Ansari-the-landlord signed a new five-year contract with his school for the property, for $168,000 annually, according to education agency records.

A home can be seen on the same piece of property as the Horizon Montessori Public School on Sugarcane Drive in Weslaco on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023. The home belonged to the superintendent of the public charter school who leased his Weslaco property to Horizon for classroom and office space, collecting $118,000 a year in rent from 2015-2020. State and local records show Ansari sold the campus and residence last June. The buyer was a nonprofit organization called South Texas Educational Technologies, which according to its tax records conducts business as Horizon Montessori. Ansari is its chairman. State and local records show the foundation purchased the property from Ansari for $1.9 million, or more than twice the $840,000 at which Hidalgo County appraised it. Records show the foundation used a private appraiser to value the parcel.
A home can be seen on the same piece of property as the Horizon Montessori Public School on Sugarcane Drive in Weslaco on Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023. The home belonged to the superintendent of the public charter school who leased his Weslaco property to Horizon for classroom and office space, collecting $118,000 a year in rent from 2015-2020. State and local records show Ansari sold the campus and residence last June. The buyer was a nonprofit organization called South Texas Educational Technologies, which according to its tax records conducts business as Horizon Montessori. Ansari is its chairman. State and local records show the foundation purchased the property from Ansari for $1.9 million, or more than twice the $840,000 at which Hidalgo County appraised it. Records show the foundation used a private appraiser to value the parcel.James Hord/Contributor

State and local records show Ansari sold the campus and residence last June. The buyer was a nonprofit organization called South Texas Educational Technologies, which conducts business as Horizon Montessori, according to its tax records. Ansari is its chairman. 

State and local records show Ansari’s foundation purchased the property from Ansari for $1.9 million — or more than twice the $840,000 at which Hidalgo County appraised it. The foundation used a private appraiser to value the parcel. 

Ansari did not respond to multiple phone and email messages. James Hayes, a CPA who sits on Horizon’s board and who also is paid $48,000 a year by the charter for accounting services, declined to comment.

Related-party arrangements are rare among modern charters, said Hoffer, the attorney who represents some of them. In some cases, he said, new schools might be forced to make such deals temporarily because they did not have the creditworthiness to borrow money to purchase facilities.

Pioneer Technology and Arts Academy, which has several campuses in the Dallas area, paid about $5 million in rent in the 2021 fiscal year to two companies, one a nonprofit and one a for-profit. Records show Superintendent Shubham Pandey has stakes in both.

Just under $3.5 million went to the nonprofit controlled by two board members of Pioneer, including Pandey. Another $1,296,418 went to Pandey’s for-profit business, PNC Partners, with more than $3 million total reported in the previous three years.

In an email, Pandey said that Pioneer’s goal all along was to transfer the school buildings from his for-profit ownership to a nonprofit. Three campuses were taken over by the nonprofit in 2019, while three others were transferred last year. Future campuses will be owned by the nonprofit, he said, and he no longer collects rent checks from the school.

But the nonprofit  did not exist when Pioneer was given its charter, and its initial application did not mention future plans to transfer assets to a nonprofit.

At ComQuest Academy Charter High School, the Houston-area charter, Superintendent Tanis Stanfield and her husband, Glenn, said they don’t earn a profit from the rent it pays their company, Peachwood Station LLC

Peachwood collected $91,000 in rent in 2021. Documents also say the company provided an additional $117,000-worth of rent for free. 

Tanis Stanfield said the couple followed the law and provided the needed space at a steep discount to the school she ran. “State charter funding for facilities was not available for the campus acquisition,” the superintendent wrote in an email.

School-owned condos?

In 2017, the Chronicle reported on Accelerated Learning Academy’s purchase of a 1,119-square-foot condo unit in the 22-story Cosmopolitan, a glassy high rise near Memorial Park, for $427,000. The school then bought a 1,340-square-foot condo in downtown Dallas’s Metropolitan Club the same year, appraisal records show. 

The school claimed both of the residential units were needed for storage space. The Dallas Appraisal District accepted that explanation, though the school already had a 9,600-square-foot, nearly empty campus in nearby Lancaster, and granted the condo a full property tax exemption. Records show Accelerated sold the condo in 2021.

The Cosmopolitan condominium building at 1600 Post Oak Blvd where Accelerated Learning Academy purchased a 1,119-square-foot condo unit, claiming they needed the space for storage, photographed Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in Houston.
The Cosmopolitan condominium building at 1600 Post Oak Blvd where Accelerated Learning Academy purchased a 1,119-square-foot condo unit, claiming they needed the space for storage, photographed Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in Houston.Jon Shapley/Staff photographer

Harris County appraisal officials have been more skeptical about the school’s use of the unit for educational purposes: “Personally, I cannot imagine that the state of Texas would allow the use of state funds to purchase this property,” the agency’s exemptions coordinator wrote in 2013, noting the Cosmopolitan’s deed restrictions prohibited condos from being used for businesses.

Accelerated has continued to seek a tax exemption. The appraisal district’s 2018 field inspection showed some plastic totes scattered throughout the unit.

“Very nice condo with granite and hardwoods,” the inspector noted. The exemption was again denied because the property did “not meet the tests prescribed by the tax code.” Records show Accelerated paid about $9,000 in property taxes on the unit last year.

Another example is the A.W. Brown Leadership Academy, which has two campuses in the Dallas area that serve about 1,000 students. Property records show it owns eight properties, several worth millions that have sat unused — even as taxpayer money has gone to repay the loans used to buy them.

Records show A.W. Brown’s real estate holdings include nearly 50,000 of commercial office space purchased with bonds in 2017. Appraised at more than $4 million, the property has been tax-free since 2018 and is vacant. Taxpayers pay for the bonds. A.W. Brown spokesman Charles Roberts said the school is still deciding how to use it.

The charter also owns a 3,400-square-foot house with an in-ground pool on 6 acres in Duncanville, identified as an office and valued at $630,000, plus 99 acres next to it, valued at more than $4 million by the appraisal district. Those were purchased more than a decade ago from professional basketball player Larry Demetric Johnson, records show.

The school has paid no taxes on either since 2014, according to appraisal records. In the fall of 2022, the school announced its plan to turn the more-than 100 acres of land into a community garden and farm for students “to learn more about agriculture and entrepreneurship,” said Roberts, the school spokesman. 

In response to questions from Hearst, Roberts said the charter would be starting “an internal audit of facility purchases.” He declined to comment further.

edward.mckinley@chron.com

eric.dexheimer@chron.com

Categories Corruption, Education Reform
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